Monday, March 26, 2018

Media Says North Korea's Nukes are Offensive. US Intel Says They're Not

The recent diplomatic breakthrough between the Trump
administration and North Korea provides a hopeful opportunity for peaceful resolution
to the crisis on the Korean peninsula. Immediately after the announcement, the
media went into overdrive to try and
undermine the development, worrying more about photographs
of Kim Jung-Un than of preventing nuclear war.

This, however, is only the latest iteration in a
long history of media reporting which has enabled an aggressive US foreign
policy.

While the momentum during the Olympic Games was
pushing towards détente, the Trump administration ramped up its “maximum
pressure” campaign. Meanwhile, the media constantly reminded its audiences of
the threat posed by North Korea’s nuclear weapons. A threat not only to the
people of the region—but likely even the United States itself.

When faced with such a threat the bellicose
posturing of the Trump administration seems perhaps to have been warranted.
After all, if the US does not coerce North Korea into denuclearization, what else
will protect us?

There is a problem though. This threat is not real.
North Korea’s nuclear program—according to official US intelligence assessments—is
defensive. Its overall military posture is designed to deter an attack –
exactly the kind that Trump has threatened them with.

By falsely portraying North Korea as the aggressor,
the press have functioned much in the same way that state-sponsored propaganda
would, bolstering an aggressive foreign policy despite the chance that it will
descend the world into a possible nuclear war.

The
Threat of Deterrence

The most authoritative assessments of US military
intelligence have repeatedly concluded that North Korea’s nuclear program is
defensive.

The most recent report
available, published by the Department of Defense in 2015, concludes that the
military capabilities of the North are designed “to deter external attack.” North
Korea’s “overarching national security objectives” are to develop nuclear
weapons, gain recognition as a nuclear armed state, and thereby establish the
“maintenance of a viable deterrent capability.” In terms of “North Korea’s
nuclear and ballistic missile programs,” the DoD clearly explains that “DPRK
(Democratic People’s Republic of Korea) leaders see these programs as necessary
for a credible deterrent capability essential to its survival.”

A similar assessment is given in the 2013 report. The
report notes that the objectives of the North Korean regime “have not changed
markedly from those pursued by Kim Jong Il,” the country’s previous leader who
came to power in the 1990’s. North Korean leaders have seen “these programs,
absent normalized relations with the international community, as leading to a
credible deterrence capability essential its goals of survival.”

Despite the public availability of these
assessments, the mainstream media continues to portray these programs as offensive.

In a New
York Times report from February 13, titled “U.S.
Opens Door to North Korea Talks, a Victory for South’s President”, the authors
uncritically quote Dan Coats, the director of national intelligence, as saying
that the current leader of North Korea, Kim Jung-Un, “probably sees nuclear
ICBMs as leverage to achieve his long-term strategic ambition to end Seoul’s alliance
with Washington and to eventually dominate the peninsula.”

While journalists routinely cite such statements
from US intelligence officials uncritically, they eschew the most exhaustive
assessments produced by the officials’ own agencies. If the DoD
report from 2012 had been consulted, it would have been understood that while
in the 60s & 70s the North did have “reason to believe its goal of
reunification on its own terms was a possibility”, ever since the 1990s “North
Korea has largely abandoned unilaterally enforced reunification as a practical
goal.”

On the diplomatic side, the Times article explains that “the Trump administration has long
resisted” the approach of peaceful negotiation because it does not want to “be
drawn into a negotiation like that of the Clinton administration in 1994, which
resulted in a deal North Korea later broke.” This last point is stated plainly as
fact.

The secretary of defense for President Clinton at
that time, who was directly involved in negotiating that deal, says the
opposite.

William Perry explains
that while the agreement was “imperfectly implemented” it did in fact “effectively
halt the regime’s nuclear progress for a time.” Attempts to iron-out a more
permanent agreement, which “were tantalizingly close”, only collapsed when the
incoming Bush administration cut-off all dialogue with the North and “abandoned
Clinton’s diplomatic plan for his own more confrontational model”, thereby losing
“a priceless opportunity.”

Importantly, Perry also says that “while [the
North Korean leadership] is evil and sometimes reckless,” it is not “crazy or
suicidal.” It knows “that if it launches a nuclear attack, the American
response would bring death to the leadership and devastation to its country. … The
arsenal achieves its goal only if North Korea does not use it.”

By omitting this crucial context, the Times lends undo credibility to the
Trump administration’s approach, and further enables the push towards possible
nuclear war.

In the Times
piece, the main explanation of North Korea’s behavior is left to a University
professor of Korean studies, who echoes the mainstream consensus when he says
that North Korea “remains a menacing nuclear state.” No attempt is made to ask
what might explain this seemingly erratic behavior, nor what it would feel like
to be in North Korea’s shoes, to have the world’s superpower threaten
to “totally destroy” your country. It is simply not considered whether such
things have anything to do with those “menacing” defensive nukes.

The Washington
Post articles add to the paranoia.

In the first, a vivid description is depicted of “the
75-foot-tall colossus… one of two intercontinental ballistic missiles to appear
abruptly on North Korean launchpads last year, and the first with sufficient
range to strike cities across the continental United States.”

In the second, the authors similarly describe how “the
North has made rapid nuclear progress in recent years, and some experts say the
country has successfully miniaturized a nuclear warhead - the kind of weapon it
could use to target the U.S. mainland.” These articles descend to the level of
scaremongering because they make no effort to ask why these capabilities are being built. If it was understood that the
only way in which these “colossus” missiles would ever threaten “to target the
U.S. mainland” is if the Trump administration launches an attack against North
Korea first—thus provoking a retaliation—people might have harsher things to
say about the administration’s behavior.

History is also turned on its head.

The Post
tells its readers that “until recently, relations with North Korea seemed at a
crisis point. North Korea was testing nuclear weapons, launching missiles
toward Japan, all as President Trump said the United States was ‘locked and
loaded’ to respond.” Another Washington
Post piece, “The
leaders of both Koreas feel like they won gold medals this week”, similarly
frames the situation as the US simply responding to North Korean provocations: “After
a year of threats, actual and rhetorical, fired from North Korea toward the
United States, the sudden burst of inter-Korean diplomacy has turned the focus
away from Washington, at least temporarily.”

The most prominent academic scholars say the actual
history has been the opposite. Instead, the pattern has been one where a
reduction in tensions initiated by the US usually results in a North Korean
reciprocation. Conversely, when the US acts aggressively the North tends to respond
in kind, usually with some kind of ballistic missile test.

According
to one of the most prominent scholars on the subject, Leon V. Sigal, director
of the Northeast Asia Cooperative Security Project at the Social Science
Research Council in New York, “Pyongyang in fact has been playing tit for
tat-reciprocating whenever Washington cooperates and retaliating whenever
Washington reneges-in an effort to end enmity.”

Indeed, if the Trump-North Korea summit breaks
down and the US increases its threats and war-games we can expect to see more
missile tests from North Korea in response, and for the media to depict them as
aggressive and hostile provocations.

Diplomatic Cover

The way the Washington
Post decided to report on the Trump administration’s recent implementation
of additional sanctions against North Korea, in “Trump
administration unveils sanctions aimed at starving North Korea of resources”,
was not to warn against the likelihood that they might undermine the slim opportunities
for peaceful negotiations, nor to denounce the negative impact they will have on
the wellbeing of the North Korean population—but to help justify the decision.

The sanctions come “as the Trump administration
seeks new ways to intensify pressure on North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, whose
increasingly advanced missile and nuclear weapon programs have made the
isolated nation the most pressing foreign threat facing the United States.” For
this statement to be taken seriously, the reader would have to believe
that the North Korean leadership is not only brutal, but downright “crazy or suicidal.”

The article ends with Nikki Haley, the United
States’ UN representative, extolling the practice of using economic suffering
as diplomatic leverage, while also castigating the North Koreans for refusing
to willfully curtail their attempts to defend themselves: “Even though North
Korea has yet to end its nuclear and missile programs, we know the sanctions
are having a real impact. The regime has less and less money to spend on its
ballistic missile tests and less capacity to threaten other countries with
those tests.”

The Post
takes this account at face-value, offering no criticisms of its accuracy nor of
its moral legitimacy. The perception that we have the right to threaten and
coerce whoever we want while they do not have the right to defend against this
seems to have transcended into the realm of unquestionable and accepted dogma.

The lasting consequence of this kind of reporting is
to provide diplomatic cover for the aggressive policies of the US government,
helping to justify actions that would likely be condemned if the population had
access to the full picture.

It is precisely this type of priming of the narrative
that enables pundits to throw scorn
upon peaceful negotiations and to favor instead the threatening of aggression
and war.

Indeed, it is only with the aid of the mass media
that someone like Trump could have gotten away with threatening to “totally
destroy” a country for attempting to defend itself, or for people to see
military action taken against North Korea – the one thing that does threatens
to send nukes into the United States – as necessary to protect the population from
nukes.

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Steven Chovanec is an independent journalist and analyst based in Chicago, Illinois. He has a bachelor’s degree in International Studies and Sociology from Roosevelt University, and has written for numerous outlets such as The Hill, TeleSUR, Truthout, MintPress News, Consortium News, INSURGE intelligence, and others. Follow him on Twitter @stevechovanec.